Eugene Jarvis left Midway about eight years ago and started Raw Thrills (http://www.rawthrills.com).

Eugene wasn't the host mentioned in the story, since he didn't work on design for Black Knight or High Speed (he does have a sound credit on HS, though). You're thinking of the other Vid Kid, Larry DeMar.

And I think the article takes a bit of a wide berth with the term "designer". Steve Ritchie actually designed those machines, Larry DeMar did the software for them.

As other posters have pointed out, innovation really did not stop in 1992. Pinball 2000 was actually a success, but Williams decided to pull the plug despite that. The Pinball 2000 platform was quite revolutionary - from how the player played the game, to how the game was designed, maintained, and even upgraded.

I don't think free play really had anything but an ancillary role in the decline of the hobby. It was likely the rise of video games, and specifically home consoles, that really hurt pinball. People played video games at home, and then played newer/better games in the arcade. Due to the cost a pinball machine in the home is a rarity to this day, and so the exposure it received was never the same. Kids learned Mario and Nintendo, they didn't learn the silver ball and flippers.

Along the lines of the article, the most "interesting" idea I heard in pinball circles was that clear coating playfields was a harbinger of doom. Williams started doing this and called it "Diamond Plate". It was designed to reduce the need for mylar to protect the playfield.

The premise is that the idea worked TOO well. Playfields on the machines could look like new forever. A machine's lifetime was extended, the impetus to replace the machine was lowered, and sales suffered.

As someone that worked with Mr. DeMar at Williams, I can honestly say that he was a "designer" in every sense of the word. He was an essential part of every design team, and a lot of times took a boring playfield and turned it into a highly entertaining game. It's really not fair to diminish the role of a programmer in these games.

You see, High Speed represented an inflection point in pinball history where the software became the star of the game, not the playfield geometry. The game told a story instead of just being a noisy point accumulator like previous solid-state games. All that choreography with lights, music, display animation, etc was a huge part of High Speed's success.

The rest of the points you make are very accurate. The article gives a very interesting history of auto-replay percentaging and match tricks, but that had very little to do with the demise of pinball in the last decade.